CUSTOM CMS / GUI DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT

REDEFINING THE USER FAN ZONE FOR

MIAMI HEAT

The Factory Interactive was able to create a website that offers fans an experience unique from any other homepage in the NBA system.

It all started off the court. At The Factory Interactive, we knew from the very beginning of the project that it would involve a lot of coordination.

While the public knows the Miami Heat as the guys they see out on the basketball court during games, the organization sprawls far beyond the players and coaches. Indeed, the Heat also includes stakeholders, the sales team, the merchandising department, the dance team, and multiple other departments and department heads—all of whom use the Miami Heat website for their own purposes.

[ what we did ]

Creative

Great design simplifies the complex, creates an emotional bond, and motivates an audience to take action. Our design team is adept at crystalizing the visual language used to communicate and connect with your audience.

Strategy

We help our clients transcend traditional marketing methodologies through the implementation of innovative digital solutions.

Technology

As a digital first agency, technology lies at the core of every solution we provide. From content management, to e-commerce, to mobile application development, our award-winning team will generate results.

The initial challenge the Miami Heat approached us to solve was the formulaic, template-based nature of their website.

Since the NBA owns the websites for every team in the league, every site was also developed by the same entity (TNT Interactive) on the same Drupal system. Every team has access to a set of templates that they can customize to suit their needs, but those templates are limited. The Heat wanted to give fans an experience as swift as their plays.

We acknowledged the Heat’s sprawling organizational DNA in our project plan, scheduling meetings and interviews with stakeholders and department heads to get a sense of what everyone wanted to see in the project. Later, as we developed tools within the NBA’s Drupal system to create a new, expressive Heat experience, we made sure to represent each section and stakeholder in the design.

Chief among those tools was a custom editing software suite for the existing Drupal system. This suite makes it easy for team employees to log in, change the content of each page—from video content to calls to action—and schedule content so that it publishes at pre-set times. We also incorporated an automatic calendar to simplify online ticket buying for fans and integrated the homepage with our Raydr Social Media Hub to drive more traffic to the website.

True to the Miami Heat’s expectations, The Factory Interactive was able to create a website that is easier for the team to manage while offering fans a unique experience. New features included:

Fully responsive layout

Full video slider support

Proprietary CMS tools that integrate seamlessly with the NBA Drupal system

Scheduling tools for sliders

Multiple call-to-action support

Automatic game calendar, including ticket links

Raydr Social Media Hub integration

These new features have yielded positive results, including significant changes in the site’s session time statistics. Overall, the Miami Heat website has seen an average session time boost of about 45%. Dwell times of less than one minute are down by 13%, while dwell times of one to five minutes are down 18%. Medium-length site visits, meanwhile—visits that last between five and ten minutes—are up 110%. These tweaks mean that Heat fans are spending more time consuming highlights of game activity, viewing merchandise, looking at the team’s social media activity, and experiencing the Miami Heat brand.

CLIENT TESTIMONIAL

“We know how important Dwyane Wade is not only to our team, but to the South Florida community as a whole. Our mission was to provide Wade fans with several easy ways to share their appreciation and The Factory Interactive was an ideal partner for this project, as they understood the ideas and timeliness of our project and able to execute our vision in a matter of days.”